The Bourne Deception - By Robert Ludlum & Eric van Lustbader Page 0,27

help him to find out who he really was. Both David Webb, the person, and the Jason Bourne identity were incomplete: the one irrevocably shattered by amnesia, the other created for him by Alex Conklin’s Treadstone program.

Was Bourne still the conflation of Conklin’s research, training, and psychological theories put to the ultimate test? Had he begun life as one person only to evolve into someone else? These were the questions that went to Bourne’s very heart. His future—and the impact he had on those he cared about and those he might even love—depended on the answer.

The priest had finished and was putting away the plaited bowl in a niche in the shrine when Bourne felt an urgent need to be cleansed by that holy water.

Kneeling behind the Balinese, he closed his eyes, allowed the priest’s words to flow over him until he was dislocated in time. He’d never before felt free of both the Bourne identity given to him by Alex Conklin and the incomplete person he knew as David Webb. Who was Webb, after all? The fact was, he didn’t know—or more accurately he couldn’t remember. There were pieces of him, to be sure, stitched together by psychologists and Bourne himself, and periodically other pieces, dislodged by some stimulus or other, would breach the surface of his consciousness with the force of a torpedo explosion. Even so, the truth was he was no closer to understanding himself—and ironically, tragically, there were times when he felt he understood Bourne far better than he did Webb. At least, he knew what motivated Bourne, whereas Webb’s motivations were still a complete mystery. Having tried and failed to reintegrate himself into Webb’s academic life, he’d decided to disengage himself from Webb. With a palpable start he realized that here on Bali he’d also begun to disengage from the Bourne identity with which he’d come to associate so closely. He thought about the Balinese he’d encountered here, Suparwita, the family that ran the mountain warung—even this priest whom he didn’t know at all, but whose words seemed to cloak him in an intense white light—and then he contrasted them with the Westerners, Firth and Willard. The Balinese were in touch with the spirits of the land, they saw good and evil and acted accordingly. There was nothing between them and nature itself, whereas Firth and Willard were creatures of civilization with all its layers of deceit, envy, greed. This essential dichotomy had opened his mind as nothing before. Did he want to be like Willard or like Suparwita? Was it a coincidence that the Balinese didn’t allow their children’s feet to touch the ground for three months—and that he’d been on Bali for precisely the same amount of time?

Now, for the first time in his defective memory, unmoored from everything and everyone he knew, he felt able to look inside himself, and what he saw was someone he didn’t recognize—not Webb, not Bourne. It was as if Webb were a dream, or another identity assigned to him just as Bourne had been.

Kneeling outside the Bat Cave with its thousands of denizens stirring restively, with the priest’s intonations transforming the intense Southern Hemisphere sunshine into prayer, he contemplated the chimeric landscape of his own soul, a place singularly twilit, like a deserted city an hour before dawn or the desolate seashore an hour after dusk, a place that slipped away from him, shifting like sand. And as he journeyed through this unknown country he asked himself this question:

Who am I?

5

THE JOINT NSA-DHS forensics team arrived in Cairo and, to the consternation of everyone except Soraya, was met at the airport by an elite contingent of al Mokhabarat, the national secret police. Team members and their belongings were poured into military vehicles and driven through the blistering heat, blazing sun, and urban chaos of Cairo. Heading southwest out of the city, they traveled toward the desert in glum and silent single file.

“Our destination is near Wadi AlRayan,” Amun Chalthoum, the head of al Mokhabarat, said to Soraya. He had spotted her immediately, culled her out of the team to sit beside him in his vehicle, which was second behind a heavily armored halftrack that Chalthoum was doubtless using to flex his muscles in the face of the Americans.

For Chalthoum time seemed to have stood still. His hair was still thick and dark, his wide copper-colored forehead still unlined. His black crow’s eyes deeply set above the hawk-beak of his nose still smoldered with suppressed emotion. He